In January, just before the penultimate season of HBO’s Girls aired, its creator and star Lena Dunham made headlines by criticising the media’s use of “gendered” and “rabidly sexist” language in coverage of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. In a Variety interview, Dunham said: “Whether it’s the attacks on her personal life or the adjectives used to describe her clothing, we have to do a full re-examination, like I literally want to make a list that we hand to media outlets that says like ‘These are the words you can’t use when describing a female candidate ...’.” She mentions: “shrill”, “inaccessible”, “difficult”, “frumpy” and “plastic”.

I agree with Dunham that there is a lot of sexist talk that has no place in a civilised discussion of Clinton or any other female candidate. I wonder, though, why Dunham doesn’t expand this standpoint to the dialogue in her own television show?

Let me start by saying that aside from Girls’s lack of non-white characters and its conservative politics regarding sexuality and romance (namely that the only type of real relationship seems to exist in monogamous, possessive, straight couple form, and nearly all sex is solely penetrative), I enjoy it. But one thing that disappoints me again and again is the use of sexist language which is, in fact, far more offensive than that used about Clinton – and which serves no purpose in forwarding the plot.

While watching Girls, I frequently cringe at the way both the male and female protagonists blurt out one woman-hating affront after another. What shocks me even more is that no one seems to have called Dunham out on it.

Celebrities who call themselves “feminist” have a responsibility to put into practice what the label actually means. At the very least, it should reflect their own work. Here’s my list of words and phrases I’d like Dunham to stop using in a disparaging way in the final season of Girls:

“Pussy”, “cunt”, “whore”, “slut”, “tramp stamp”, “be a man”, “man-up”, and “bitch”. In the right context (such as simply describing female anatomy, sexual role-playing, reclaiming language, or when used to point out everyday sexism) these words are acceptable. But when used in a derogatory way by a central character such as Hannah, Jessa or Adam, they are unmistakably misogynistic.

Each word or phrase on the list has been spoken by the main cast of Girls in a derisive and unironic way. Many are found in the new series, as well as being littered through all four of its former seasons. Last week’s show, Old Loves, is a perfect example. Adam tells Jessa, “You’re a pussy”, meaning that she’s cowardly and weak for not acting on her desire for him. “Pussy” is commonly used to put a man down, of course, and when used by a woman (as it has been previously by Jessa) it means exactly the same thing. In essence: don’t be like a girl.

Later, Jessa and Hannah fight at a rice-pudding shop. After storming out, Hannah comes back inside to say: “But seriously, you are the biggest bitch I’ve ever met in my whole life. You are a total cunt.”

At the end of the episode before that, while Hannah jealously deletes Fran’s photos of his naked ex-girlfriends, she murmurs: “What are you smiling about, you little whore? Delete. Oh cool, a tramp stamp, a star.” In this moment of sex-positive feminism and fighting for sex workers’ rights, how retrograde is it to hear “whore” used as a putdown? Do we really need to find slut-shaming and other female-bashing speech in the pop culture made by feminists too?

I look forward to a day when a word used to describe women’s sexual anatomy is not the worst possible insult to hurl at someone. The way to achieve that is certainly not by casually perpetuating it on purportedly feminist TV shows.